Bluebeard

  Anything! Anything! Roast beef! Paint a picture of this studio! Who cares? Broccoli!

  O.K. I would show him.

  And I did.

  It was up to his real assistant, Fred Jones, the World War One aviator, to think up work for me to do. Fred made me a messenger, which must have been a terrible blow for the messenger service he had been using. Somebody who desperately needed a job, any kind of job, must have been thrown out of work when Fred gave me a handful of subway tokens and a map of New York City.

  He also set me the task of cataloguing all the valuable objects in Gregory's studio.

  "Won't that bother Mr. Gregory while he's working?" I said.

  And he said: "You could saw him off at the waist while singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' and he wouldn't notice. Just keep away from his eyes and hands."

  So I was up in the studio, just a few feet from Dan Gregory, itemizing in a ledger his extensive collection of bayonets, when Marilee came home. I remember still how full of bad magic all those spearpoints to be put on the ends of rifles seemed to be. One was like a sharpened curtain rod. Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn't close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out. Another one had sawteeth--so it could work its way through bone, I guess. I can remember thinking that war was so horrible that, at last, thank goodness, nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and fiction and history into marching to war again.

  Nowadays, of course, you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy boutique.

  The sounds of Marilee's homecoming floated up from down below. I myself, so much in her debt, didn't hurry down to greet her. I think the cook and my first wife were right: I have always been leery of women--possibly because, as Circe Berman suggested at breakfast this morning, I considered my mother faithless, since she had up and died on me.

  Maybe so.

  Anyway: she had to send for me, and I behaved with formality. I did not know that Gregory had almost killed her because of the art materials she had sent to me. If I had known that, I might still have been very formal. One thing, surely, which prevented my being effusive, was my sense of my own homeliness and powerlessness and virginity. I was unworthy of her, since she was as beautiful as Madeleine Carroll, the most beautiful of all movie stars.

  She was cool and stiff with me, too, I have to say, possibly answering formality with formality. There was probably this factor, too: she wanted to make it clear to me, to Fred, to Gregory, to the hermaphrodite cook, to everybody, that she had not caused me to be brought all the way from the West Coast for purposes of hanky-panky.

  And if only I could get back there in a time machine, what incredible fortune I could tell for her:

  "You will be as beautiful as you are now, but much, much wiser, when you and I are reunited in Florence, Italy, after World War Two. What a war you will have had!

  "You and Fred and Gregory will have moved to Italy, and Fred and Gregory will have been killed in the Battle of Sidi Barrani--in Egypt. You will have then won the heart of Mussolini's minister of culture, Bruno, the Oxford-educated Count Portomaggiore, one of Italy's largest landowners. He will also have been head of the British spy apparatus in Italy all through the war."

  When I visited her in her palace after the war, incidentally, she showed me a painting given to her by the mayor of Florence. It depicted the death of her late husband before a Fascist firing squad near the end of the war.

  The painting was the sort of commercial kitsch Dan Gregory used to do, and of which I myself was and remain capable.

  Her sense of her place in the world back in 1933, with the Great Depression going on, revealed itself, I think, in a conversation we had about A Doll's House, the play by Henrik Ibsen. A new reader's edition of that play had just come out, with illustrations by Dan Gregory, so we both read it and then discussed it afterwards.

  Gregory's most compelling illustration showed the very end of the play, with the leading character, Nora, going out the front door of her comfortable house, leaving her middle-class husband and children and servants behind, declaring that she had to discover her own identity out in the real world before she could be a strong mother and wife.

  That is how the play ends. Nora isn't going to allow herself to be patronized for being as uninformed and helpless as a child anymore.

  And Marilee said to me, "That's where the play begins as far as I'm concerned. We never find out how she survived. What kind of job could a woman get back then? Nora didn't have any skills or education. She didn't even have money for food and a place to stay."

  That was precisely Marilee's situation, too, of course. There was nothing waiting for her outside the door of Gregory's very comfortable dwelling except hunger and humiliation, no matter how meanly he might treat her.

  A few days later, she told me that she had solved the problem. "That ending is a fake!" she said, delighted with herself. "Ibsen just tacked it on so the audience could go home happy. He didn't have the nerve to tell what really happened, what the whole rest of the play says has to happen."

  "What has to happen?" I said.

  "She has to commit suicide" said Marilee. "And I mean right away--in front of a streetcar or something before the curtain comes down. That's the play. Nobody's ever seen it, but that's the play!"

  I have had quite a few friends commit suicide, but was never able to see the dramatic necessity for it that Marilee saw in Ibsen's play. That I can't see that necessity is probably yet another mark of my shallowness as a participant in a life of serious art.

  These are just my painter friends who killed themselves, all with considerable artistic successes behind them or soon to come:

  Arshile Gorky hanged himself in 1948. Jackson Pollock, while drunk, drove his car into a tree along a deserted road in 1956. That was right before my first wife and kids walked out on me. Three weeks later, Terry Kitchen shot himself through the roof of his mouth with a pistol.

  Back when we all lived in New York City, Pollock and Kitchen and I, heavy drinkers all, were known in the Cedar Tavern as the "Three Musketeers."

  Trivia question: How many of the Three Musketeers are alive today? Answer: me.

  Yes, and Mark Rothko, with enough sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet to kill an elephant, slashed himself to death with a knife in 1970.

  What conclusion can I draw from such grisly demonstrations of terminal discontent? Only this: some people are a lot harder than others, with Marilee and me typifying those others, to satisfy.

  Marilee said this about Nora in A Doll's House: "She should have stayed home and made the best of things."

  19

  BELIEF IS NEARLY the whole of the Universe, whether based on truth or not, and I believed back then that sperm, if not ejaculated, was reprocessed by healthy males into substances which made them athletic, merry, brave and creative. Dan Gregory believed this, too, and so did my father, and so did the United States Army and the Boy Scouts of America and Ernest Hemingway. So I cultivated erotic fantasies about making love to Marilee, and behaved as though we were courting sometimes, but only in order to generate more sperm which could be converted into the beneficial chemicals.

  I used to shuffle my feet for a long time on a carpet, and then give Marilee an electric shock with my fingertips when she wasn't expecting it--on the back of her neck or her cheek or a hand. How is that for pornography?

  I also got her to sneak off with me and do something which would have made Gregory furious, if he had found out about it, which was to go to the Museum of Modern Art.

  But she certainly wasn't about to promote me erotically above the rank of pest and playmate. Not only did she love Gregory, but he was also making it very easy for both of us to get through the Great Depression. First things first.

  Meanwhile, though, we were innocently exposing ourselves to a master seducer against whose blandishments we were defenseless. It was too late for either of us to turn back by the time w
e realized how deeply embroiled we had let ourselves become.

  Want to guess who or what it was?

  It was the Museum of Modern Art.

  The theory that sperm, if unspent, was converted into cosmic vitamins seemed validated by my own performances. Running errands for Gregory, I became as cunning as a sewer rat about the fastest ways to get from anywhere to anywhere on the island of Manhattan. I quintupled my vocabulary, learning the names and functions of every important part of every sort of organism and artifact. My most thrilling accomplishment, however, was this: I finished a meticulously accurate painting of Gregory's studio in only six months! The bone was bone, the fur was fur, the hair was hair, the dust was dust, the soot was soot, the wool was wool, the cotton was cotton, the walnut was walnut, the oak was oak, the horsehide was horsehide, the cowhide was cowhide, the iron was iron, the steel was steel, the old was old and the new was new.

  Yes, and the water dripping from the skylight in my painting was not only the wettest water you ever saw: in each droplet, if you looked at it through a magnifying glass, there was the whole damned studio! Not bad! Not bad!

  An idea has just come to me from nowhere, to wit: Might not the ancient and nearly universal belief that sperm could be metabolized into noble actions have been the inspiration for Einstein's very similar formula: "E equals MC squared"?

  "Not bad, not bad," said Dan Gregory of my painting, and I imagined his feeling like Robinson Crusoe on the occasion of Crusoe's understanding that he no longer had his little island all to himself. There was now me to reckon with.

  But then he said, "However, not bad is another term for disappointing or worse, wouldn't you say?"

  Before I could frame a reply, he had put the picture atop the glowing coals in the fireplace with the skulls on its mantelpiece. Six months' painstaking work went up the flue in a moment.

  I managed to ask chokingly, perfectly aghast, "What was the matter with it?"

  "No soul," he said complacently.

  So there I was in the thrall of the new Imperial engraver Beskudnikov!

  I knew what he was complaining about, and the complaint wasn't laughable, coming from him. His own pictures were vibrant with the full spectrum of his own loves, hates and neutralities, as dated as that spectrum might seem today. If I were to visit that private museum in Lubbock, Texas, where so many of his works are on permanent display, the pictures would create for me a sort of hologram of Dan Gregory. I could pass my hand through it, but it would be Dan Gregory in three dimensions all the same. He lives!

  If I, on the other hand, were to die, God forbid, and if some magician were to recover every painting of mine, from the one Gregory incinerated to the last one I will ever do, and if these were to be hung in a great domed rotunda so as to concentrate the soul in each one at the same focal point, and if my own mother and the women who swore they loved me, which would be Marilee and Dorothy and Edith, were to stand for hours at that focal point, along with the best friend I ever had, who was Terry Kitchen, not one of them would find any reason to think about me except randomly. There would not be a trace of their dear departed Rabo Karabekian, or of spiritual energy of any sort, at the focal point!

  What an experiment!

  Oh, I know: I bad-mouthed Gregory's works a while back, saying he was a taxidermist, and that his pictures were always about a single moment rather than the flow of life, and so on. But he was sure a better painter than I could ever hope to be. Nobody could put more of the excitement of a single moment into the eyes of stuffed animals, so to speak, than Dan Gregory.

  Circe Berman has just asked me how to tell a good picture from a bad one.

  I said that the best answer I had ever heard to that question, although imperfect, came from a painter named Syd Solomon, a man about my age who summers not far from here. I overheard him say it to a very pretty girl at a cocktail party maybe fifteen years ago. She was so wide-eyed and on tippy-toe! She sure wanted to learn all about art from him.

  "How can you tell a good painting from a bad one?" he said. This is the son of a Hungarian horse trainer. He has a magnificent handlebar mustache.

  "All you have to do, my dear," he said, "is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken."

  It's true! It's true!

  The present again:

  I must tell what happened here yesterday afternoon, when I received the first visitors to my collection since the foyer was, to use the decorator's term, "redone." A young man from the State Department escorted three writers from the Soviet Union, one from Tallin, Estonia, where Mrs. Berman's ancestors came from, after the Garden of Eden, of course, and two from Moscow, Dan Gregory's old hometown. Small world. They spoke no English, but their guide was an able interpreter.

  They made no comment on the foyer when they came in, and proved to be sophisticated and appreciative with respect to Abstract Expressionism, quite a contrast with many other guests from the USSR. As they were leaving, though, they had to ask me why I had such trashy pictures in the foyer.

  So I gave them Mrs. Berman's lecture on the horrors which awaited these children, bringing them close to tears. They were terribly embarrassed. They apologized effusively for not understanding the true import of the chromos, and said that, now that I had explained them, they were unanimous in agreeing that these were the most important pictures in the house. And then they went from picture to picture, bewailing all the pain each girl would go through. Most of this wasn't translated, but I gathered that they were predicting cancer and war and so on.

  I was quite a hit, and was hugged and hugged.

  Never before had visitors bid me farewell so ardently! Usually they can hardly think of anything to say.

  And they called something to me from the driveway, grinning affectionately and shaking their heads. So I asked the man from the State Department what they had said, and he translated: "No more war, no more war.

  20

  BACK TO THE PAST:

  When Dan Gregory burned up my painting, why didn't I do to him what he had done to Beskudnikov? Why didn't I mock him and walk out and find a better job? For one thing, I had learned a lot about the commercial art world by then, and knew that artists like me were a dime a dozen and all starving to death.

  Consider all I had to lose: a room of my own, three square meals a day, entertaining errands to run all over town, and lots of playtime with the beautiful Marilee.

  What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

  After the hermaphroditic cook died, incidentally, Sam Wu, the laundryman, asked for the job and got it. He was a wonderful cook of good, honest American food as well as Chinese delicacies, and Gregory continued to use him as a model for the sinister master criminal Fu Manchu.

  Back to the present:

  Circe Berman said to me at lunch today that I ought to try painting again, since it used to give me such pleasure.

  My dear wife Edith made the same suggestion one time, and I told Mrs. Berman what I told her: "I have had all I can stand of not taking myself seriously."

  She asked me what had been the most pleasing thing about my professional life when I was a full-time painter--having my first one-man show, getting a lot of money for a picture, the comradeship with fellow painters, being praised by a critic, or what?

  "We used to talk a lot about that in the old days," I said. "There was general agreement that if we were put into individual capsules with our art materials, and fired out into different parts of outer space, we would still have everything we loved about painting, which was the opportunity to lay on paint."

  I asked her in turn what the high point was for writers--getting great reviews, or a terrific advance, or selling a book to the movies, or seeing somebody reading your book, or what?

  She said that she, too, could find happiness in a capsule in outer space, provided that she had a finished, proofread manuscript by her in there, along with somebody from her publishing house.

  "I don't under
stand," I said.

  "The orgastic moment for me is when I hand a manuscript to my publisher and say, 'Here! I'm all through with it. I never want to see it again,'" she said.

  Back to the past again:

  Marilee Kemp wasn't the only one who was trapped like Nora in A Doll's House before Nora blew her cork. I was another one. And then I caught on: Fred Jones was still another one. He was so handsome and dignified and honored, seemingly, to be of assistance to the great artist Dan Gregory in any way possible--but he was a Nora, too.

  His life had been all downhill since World War One, when he had discovered a gift for flying rattletrap kites which were machine-gun platforms. The first time he got his hands on the joystick of an airplane, he must have felt what Terry Kitchen felt when he gripped a spray gun. He must have felt like Kitchen again when he fired his machine guns up in the wild blue yonder, and saw a plane in front of him draw a helix of smoke and flame--ending in a sunburst far below.

  What beauty! So unexpected and pure! So easy to achieve!

  Fred Jones told me one time that the smoke trails of falling airplanes and observation balloons were the most beautiful things he ever expected to see. And I now compare his elation over arcs and spirals and splotches in the atmosphere with what Jackson Pollock used to feel as he watched what dribbled paint chose to do when it struck a canvas on his studio floor.

  Same sort of happiness!

  Except that what Pollock did lacked that greatest of all crowd pleasers, which was human sacrifice.

  But my point about Fred Jones is this: he had found a home in the Air Corps, just as I would find a home in the Corps of Engineers.

  And then he was kicked out for the same reason that I was: he had lost an eye somewhere.

  So there is something startling I might tell myself as a youth, if I could get back to the Great Depression in a time machine: "Pst--you, the cocky little Armenian kid. Yes, you. You think Fred Jones is funny and sad at the same time? That's what you'll be someday, too: a one-eyed old soldier, afraid of women and with no talent for civilian life."